Knowledge of mathematics and physics is also important for a physician because they contribute to formation of a materialistic viewpoint on a living body and the processes in it.
In practice, a physician constantly deals with a number of quantitative indices (body temperature, blood pressure, medication dosage, etc.), so one should know how these values are obtained, what is their accuracy, what units they are presented in. Nowadays, a health professional should have an idea about processing of measurement results, be able to use computers and peripherals. Society, human, computer are examples of systems that are able to receive and process information. Such systems, both living and non-living, are subject of cybernetics studies. Problems of cybernetics as some common problems related to various sections of the course, are discussed here. Thus, this section can be considered as a metrological, mathematical and cybernetics introduction to medical and biological physics.
Chapter 1 Introduction to metrology
Metrology is a science of measurements, methods, and means of ensuring their unity, and ways to achieve the required accuracy. In the chapter, along with general problems of metrology, indicators of measurements in biology and medicine are considered.
§ 1.1. BASIC PROBLEMS AND CONCEPTS OF METROLOGY
A measurement is finding a value of a physical quantity experimentally using technical facilities. Measurements allow us to establish laws of nature and are an element of knowledge of the world around us.
There are direct measurements, when a result is obtained directly by measurement of the value itself (taking a body temperature with a clinical thermometer, measurement of the length of an object with a ruler), and indirect ones, when the sought for value is found by the known relationship between it and values being measured directly (determination of body weight taking into account the buoyant force, determination of the viscosity of liquid by velocity of falling ball in it). Technical facilities of measurements (gauges) can be different. For a reader, the most known gauge is a measurement instrument, where the information being measured is presented in a form that is accessible to direct perception by the observer (the temperature is represented by the thermometer as the length of the mercury column, the current is represented with the ammeter pointer readout or the digital value).